Using Deep CNN with Data Permutation Scheme for Classification of Alzheimer's Disease in Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI)

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for structural magnetic resonance image (sMRI) classification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) with data combination, outlier removal, and entropy-based data selection using AlexNet. In order to overcome problems of conventional classical machine learning methods, the AlexNet classifier, with a deep learning architecture, was employed for training and classification. A data permutation scheme including slice integration, outlier removal, and entropy-based sMRI slice selection is proposed to utilize the benefits of AlexNet. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can effectively utilize the AlexNet with the proposed data permutation scheme by significantly improving overall classification accuracies for AD classification. The proposed method achieves 95.35% and 98.74% classification accuracies on the OASIS and ADNI datasets, respectively, for the binary classification of AD and Normal Control (NC), and also achieves 98.06% accuracy for the ternary classification of AD, NC, and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) on the ADNI dataset. The proposed method can attain significantly improved accuracy of up to 18.15%, compared to previously developed methods.